Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Editing of Frost Notebooks in Dispute

Robert Frost wrote some of this country’s most quoted — and in the minds of some, most misunderstood — poetic lines.

Now a recently published compendium of his personal notebooks is coming under attack from two critics who say that the editor of the volume, Robert Faggen, mistranscribed hundreds, if not thousands, of Frost’s words.

Mr. Faggen, a professor and chairman of the department of English at Claremont McKenna College in California, published his book, “The Notebooks of Robert Frost,” last January. In the 809-page volume from Harvard University Press, Mr. Faggen collected the contents of 47 of Frost’s notebooks as well as some loose pages that are stored in archives at Boston University, Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia.

The volume, which represents the first time the notebooks have been published in their entirety, was widely praised by reviewers. For scholars and fans of Frost’s work, the notebooks, filled with poetry fragments, lists, lecture notes and tangential musings, provide insight into his thinking and creative process. In a review published last February in The New York Times Book Review, David Orr, who writes frequently about poetry, wrote, “Any Frost reader will benefit from Faggen’s thoughtful introduction and be intrigued by the way in which concepts from these largely aphoristic journals animate the poems and vice versa.”

But in a review published in October in Essays and Criticism, a British literary journal, James Sitar, who recently completed his Ph.D. in editorial studies at Boston University and is now the archive editor at poetryfoundation.org, the Web site of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, said he reviewed four of the original Frost notebooks housed in Boston University’s archives and found “roughly one thousand” errors in Mr. Faggen’s work.

“Broadly speaking, then, publication of this edition is a great occasion, and readers and scholars should be grateful,” Mr. Sitar writes, “but their excitement about this new material may be lessened when they notice, as early reviewers have not, that the transcription is untrustworthy.”

Most other reviewers have not compared Mr. Faggen’s work with the original notebooks and therefore have no way of knowing whether some of the more obscure passages or spelling and grammatical mistakes are Frost’s or Mr. Faggen’s.

But one other critic, William Logan, a poet and English professor at the University of Florida, also compared Mr. Faggen’s transcriptions with about 30 pages from the original notebooks, this time from the Dartmouth archives. Like Mr. Sitar, he concluded that Mr. Faggen’s work is filled with errors.

In a forthcoming review to be published in March in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, an American poetry journal, Mr. Logan writes: “Obliged though readers must be for this unknown Frost, the transcription is a scandal. To read this volume is to believe that Frost was a dyslexic and deranged speller, that his brisk notes frequently made no sense, that he often traded the expected word for some fanciful or perverse alternative.”

But Mr. Faggen suggests that Frost, who died in 1963, did often employ “odd spellings” in the notebooks. He disputed one reading by Mr. Logan in which he accused Mr. Faggen of failing to make note of a biblical reference when he had done so. In Mr. Faggen’s version a phrase from the notebooks is rendered as “Sog Magog Mempleremagog,” and is footnoted for its source in the Book of Ezekiel. Mr. Logan regards the phrase as a misreading because “Gog and Magog” are the actual Biblical names and because there is a real lake between Vermont and Quebec that is spelled Memphremagog. Mr. Faggen argues that Frost changed the “G” in “Gog” to an “S” as a jest about the lake and says the misspelled lake’s name is what Frost wrote.

“My practices are in harmony with those of most other editors of Frost’s manuscripts: I let his misspellings stand,” Mr. Faggen wrote in an e-mail message. “This is not an error. In short, we have here a matter of critical judgment, the sort any responsible editor must exercise. And I maintain that most of the passages about which Mr. Logan raises questions fall into this category.”

Scholars and critics have long argued over how a dead writer’s work is transcribed for publication. Academics still argue about the words of James Joyce or Shakespeare. Frost himself has been the subject of passionate disputes over punctuation in the poems he wrote for publication.

But Frost did not intend his notebooks to be published, and they are filled with inserts and crossings out that make them hard to decipher. His handwriting, which is spidery and cramped, can be difficult to read.

Mr. Faggen, who worked on the notebooks over a period of five years, provided symbols throughout the text that indicated where he deemed words illegible or where his readings were uncertain. In an interview he said: “Any project of this nature and magnitude is bound to invite criticism and undergo changes and improvements, a great many of which have been incorporated in the forthcoming paperback edition.”

Mr. Sitar, who transcribed a series of Frost’s lectures and annotated and critiqued them in his Ph.D. dissertation, declined to comment. In his review, some of the errors he points out in Mr. Faggen’s transcriptions are tiny, on the order of typographical errors: “the ‘s’ in ‘bags’ should be struck through;” “ ‘not goal’ should read ‘no goal.’ ” But Mr. Sitar also notes that Mr. Faggen leaves out or deems illegible multiple lines — and in at least two instances, drafts of poems — for which Mr. Sitar provides readings.

Mr. Faggen declined to comment further on the specific examples noted by Mr. Sitar.

Mr. Logan acknowledges that many of the errors he discerns are typographical in nature but suggests that some are more substantial. In one passage, for example, where Frost invokes baseball as a metaphor, Mr. Faggen renders the poet’s writing as: “I see a player serving two or three bats” followed by a puzzling reference to a “picktie exhibition.” Mr. Logan reads those phrases as: “I see a player swing two or three bats” and a “public exhibition.”

“I was at first unwilling to trust my eyes against the eyes of an editor who had been so long involved with such a text,” Mr. Logan said in an interview. “But I fear that my readings are correct and that the book is wrong in hundreds and possibly thousands of places.”

Mr. Orr, who read Mr. Sitar’s review but has not yet seen Mr. Logan’s article, said he was troubled by the errors pointed out by Mr. Sitar. “If the alleged transcription problems are genuine and pervasive,” Mr. Orr wrote in an e-mail message, “this is a real problem” for Harvard University Press.

A spokeswoman for Harvard University Press declined to comment on the allegation of errors in Mr. Faggen’s transcriptions. “We stand behind our authors and our books 100 percent,” she said. Harvard is planning several other editions of unpublished works by Frost — transcribed by Mr. Faggen and others — including his lectures and letters.

Other scholars who have examined Frost’s unpublished writings defended Mr. Faggen. “The notebooks are very complex documents,” said Mark Richardson, a professor of American literature at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. “They present extraordinary challenges.” Mr. Richardson recently published a collection of Frost’s prose with the Harvard University Press and is now working on an edition of the poet’s letters with Mr. Faggen.

John Ridland, emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said he had transcribed some of Frost’s notebooks for a lecture he gave 15 years ago and believed Mr. Faggen has improved on some of his readings. “I several times remember comparing with his and thinking he had made sense of a word that I had not caught,” Mr. Ridland said.

Jay Parini, a Frost scholar and professor at Middlebury College, also described the difficulty of reading Frost’s “chicken scrawlish” handwriting. But he added that niggling over the exact wording in notebooks Frost never intended for public consumption did not seem as important as, say, settling punctuation disputes about the published poems. The notebooks, Mr. Parini said, are “fun to read, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter anything about Robert Frost.”